


There but for the grace of the tregetour go I

by noxelementalist



Category: Glass Thorns Series- Melanie Rawn
Genre: 4+1, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Tabletop Gaming, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-06-27 08:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19787218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxelementalist/pseuds/noxelementalist
Summary: 4 Lives they could’ve lived, and the one they are





	There but for the grace of the tregetour go I

**Author's Note:**

> So within Glass Thorns, Cade has the ability to foresee alternative futures. Well, why stop there? Written because I can, and because this series should be on AO3 THEY ARE SO SLASHY UGH

  1. **The First Life They Could’ve Lived**



“Welcome to Mistress Luta’s Moonglade. What would you like to drink fair traveler?”

“Caffeine,” Mieka said hurriedly. “Large amounts, stat.”

“My good lord—”

“My _fair maiden_ ,” Mieka interrupted, his foot beginning to tap anxiously against the floor. “I know that this is a themed coffee shop. I _know_ you have special, _time-period_ appropriate names for every drink. And normally, I’d be _all up_ in that. But I’m a senior theater major trying to create a modern, five act play that’s a slightly gender-queer reinterpretation of St. George and the Dragon that _doesn’t_ involve casting a non-cisgendered man as the knight, and I’ve got all of one evening to finalize the proposed script before I can actually start interviewing for my co-producer. An interview process, I might add, that’ll be hellish since I’ve got to pry away _English lit majors_ from writing _theses_ and convince them I’ve got a story for them, while I get scenery and special effects in order, when I’m pretty much one prop hat away from doing this on a wing and a Mad Jester’s prayer. So when I say caffeine, I mean _caf-fricking-iene.”_

“I got this one,” a male voice from behind him said.

Mieka turned around and looked at the guy standing behind him. “I will happily let you take care of me- I mean, it,” he said.

The other man laughed. “Of course,” he said. “Blye?”

“Yes Cayden?” the barista behind the counter said.

“I’d like a Continental Kelpie and an order of Brishen’s Thorn with a blue withie for the bard here.”

“That’ll be seventeen coins.”

“Coins?”

“Store’s term for dollars, since dollars hadn’t been invented yet,” the man whose name was apparently Cayden told him.

“I am much beholden,” Mieka replied.

Cayden grinned. “So what’s a coal-haired, milky-skin tenor beauty like you doing in a Renaissance Fair coffee shop?”

“Getting way more caffeinated before trying to finalize a play that I’ll be putting on for my showcase next spring. And you?”

“Trying to get _less_ caffeinated before I sit down to try to finalize my Master’s thesis.”

“Oh? What’s your Master’s in?” Mieka asked.

“English.”

“Ah.”

“With a concentration in Renaissance English,” Cayden went on, the light tone in his voice making a part of Mieka’s decaffeinated brain wonder if the other man was secretly laughing at him.

“That’s…impressive.”

Cayden shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, I like it,” he said, shuffling to lean onto the counter, “though it gets me a lot of poor English major jokes.”

Mieka nodded. “As a theater major, I feel your pain.”

“Which one do you hate more: the ‘how are you going to pay the bills’ version or the ‘you gotta struggle for your art’?”

“The ‘oh, really? I did a little of that in high school’ ones.”

“Yes!” Cayden laughed. “I almost forgot about those!”

“One Continental Kelpie and a Brishen’s Thorn with a blue withie for the Wizard and Elven Bard who _still haven’t left the counter_.”

“Elf?”

“Oh come on Blye, it’s not like the rush is set in yet,” Cayden was saying, seemingly ignoring Mieka’s question. “Why move when we can chat here? It’s not like you’ve got leather couches to lounge on.”

“Elf?”

“We have perfectly acceptable, period-accurate tavern ware for you,” Blye told him, absently flicking a strand of braided hair behind her ear.

“You know me and wooden tables Blye.”

“You type your stories now Cay, I don’t think you can ink stain a table like that anymore.”

“Excuse me, _Elf_?”

“Elven Bards are pretty standard,” the barista ( _Blye_ , Mieka reminded himself) said, “given their connection to the musical tradition.”

“Blye’s getting her glassworks certification,” Cayden explained to the confused man. “Apparently, there’s a lot of Irish harp drinking designs.”

Blye snorted. “If Briarley asks me for one more of those, there isn’t a jury in the world that would convict me for ending him,” she said.

“Right…” Mieka said, as he cautiously took a sip of the drink they had called a Brishen’s Thorn. The cup it was in seemed like a simple off-white mug, which made him a little reluctant to sip the neon blue beverage inside it.

“Do you need me to have a word with him?” Cayden was asking.

“Who, Briarley? No, I got it,” Blye told him.

The drink splashed across Mieka tongue, and the theater major physically felt as the taste-buds in his mouth went from “oh, it’s blue” to “YE-GADS BLUEBERRY DEATH,” coupled with his ears beginning to box as the caffeine kicked in.

“Sweet mother of Shakespeare, what is _in_ this?” Mieka blurted out, interrupting what he was sure was an interesting conversation between Cayden and Blye that he had zoned out on in favor of having his mind blown by a beverage that tasted like someone had modified a jägerbomb to be made of blue colored tequila and black coffee sludge instead of herbal liquor, beer, and poor life choices. “’Cause don’t get me wrong, I’m 1000% awake now, but I also feel like a 1990s club raver on crack.”

“I don’t want to know how you know what that feels like,” Cayden told him after a moment, “but nobody knows.”

“Lady Megueris Mindrising, the store owner, won’t tell us,” Blye says. “All of us have tried, and all she’ll say is a ton of blueberries, but we know that’s just the withie part.”

“My brother, Drery, thinks she may have trade-secreted the actual drink, like a spy,” Cayden said as Mieka tenaciously took another sip of the drink.

Mieka shook his head. “Oh that dragon is going down,” he said. “Just- pour this in a to-go cup, please, this’ll last me awhile.”

“Dragon?” Cayden asked as Blye took a stylized travel mug, the cover imprinted with the store’s crest, out from under the counter. “A theater major’s about to turn into Bilbo Baggins?”

“He’s doing a gender-performative version of St. George and the Dragon,” Blye explained as she took the cup from Mieka’s (now jittery) hands. “Only he’s _not_ swapping George for someone not cisgender male.”

Cayden hummed. “Well the oldest versions I know for the myth would have George be Greco-Turkish, the princess from Egypt, and the Dragon actually a Roman military general, so I suppose there’s some gender expectations of manliness involved in there,” he said. “What are you thinking of doing?”

Mieka stared at the man, his newly caffeinated brain picking up on (admittedly unhelpful, but pleasant) details like Cayden’s gold-blonde hair; large nose, the kind his stuffy uncle would’ve called patrician; and the general gangly state of Cayden’s toned, but clearly generously long, limbs. “Please tell me your Master’s final is almost finished, or potentially needs a theater major, because I want you to make my showcase, just for that comment,” he told him. “And I’m debating between being horrible and making the dragon their socially accursed child, or being kind of sweet and making it their hard-to-impress supervisor.”

“My final isn’t going to be almost finished until next spring, but it actually _does_ need a theater major to glance over it because I’m looking at how different interpretations of Shakespeare’s Rose theater impacts how we read works set in his period there,” Cayden said. “Also, I’m morally obligated to prevent you from doing either of those options, they’re terrible and you can do better.”

“Throw in more of this stuff,” Mieka said as he took the travel mug from Blye, “And I’ll happily swap co-producer labor for manuscript-reviewer labor.”

Cayden blinked. “Sold,” he said.

  1. **The Second Life They Could’ve Lived**



“A Golden Falcon?” Yazz asked. “Miek, your soulmate’s either a movie buff or filthy rich.”

“Or both,” Mieka said, poking gingerly at the spot along his collarbone where the bird had appeared to make sure of its shape. “Both’s good too.”

The two high-schoolers were trying to lie down on the twin bed in Mieka’s room, a small, equally twin-sized room a realtor would’ve considered the “Jack” of a suburban house Jack and Jill, but which the Windthistle family had nicknamed “the Watchtower” for its excellent view of the river that wound through downtown. Yazz, who had already reached his family’s giant height, had stretched out along the wall, his feet dangling off of Mieka’s bed. This gave Mieka just enough space on the bed to lie down and rest his head on Yazz’s chest so that the two of them could look more easily at the mark that had appeared just as Mieka and Yazz had gotten home from school, the glow almost going unseen under Mieka’s uniform until he’d cast it onto the floor.

It had been one hour since then, and the glow had only just settled down into a defined enough shape for the two of them to see what it was.

“Cor, I hope my soulmate isn’t either,” Yazz was saying. “Probably’d think me too common.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it mate.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Soulmates are supposed to get you, ain’t they?” Mieka said, thumbing the mark on his collar as he talked. The falcon didn’t seem to move the way he’d seen the tattoos on his older brother’s arm did, but seemed to resist moving at all, as if it was stubbornly trying to insist to the world that Mieka’s soulmate was now present to the whole world. “I hope mine will.”

“Course yours will,” Yazz scoffed. “You’re the easiest person to get.”

Mieka grinned at his friend. “It’s just- can you believe it Yazz? Somewhere, right now in the world, there’s a person who knows their soulmate just turned sixteen. You think they’re wondering who the person who got their mark is?”

“I—“

“Miek!” a voice shouted from downstairs. “Are you and Yazz up there?”

“Yes Mrs. Windthistle!” Yazz shouted back.

“Everything alright Mum?” Mieka yelled.

“It will be!” Mrs. Windthistle replied, just as the sound of thudding footsteps came.

“Who—” Mieka began to ask just as the door to his room opened.

Three teenagers stood on the other side of the door. One of them, dressed in worn sneakers and jeans, took one look at Mieka and Yazz on the bed and went, “Oh I really, _really_ hope it’s the pocket-sized one.”

“It’s gotta be,” the second, who wore the prep uniform of the fancy rich boy school Mieka walked past every morning to the bus stop, said to him. “No way that giant’s Cay’s, they’d barely fit.”

“Oy, the giant’s name’s Yazz boyo,” Yazz said, scowling. “Didn’t catch yours.”

“Will you two _move_?” a warm voice Mieka guessed belonged to the third boy said impatiently.

“Right, sorry,” the prep boy said, shuffling into Mieka’s room and flopping onto the floor of his room, his back resting against the bed so that Yazz’s foot dangled next to the boy’s shoulder.

Mieka almost missed him moving as he watched who walked in.

The boy standing there wasn’t much to look at. Like Mieka he still had room to grow, although the breadth of shoulders made it clear to him that one day he was going to be broad and not wiry like Mieka knew he was going to look like. He had floppy straw hair, and piercing, light-colored eyes that matched his polo shirt (a shirt that hung almost deliciously well, though Mieka wasn’t focusing on that at the moment.) The boy was staring at Mieka, his eyes landing on him- like he was something fancier than just another teenage bloke in ripped jeans and a band t-shirt in a bedroom with school bags and dirty clothes scattered on the ground.

“Mieka?” the boy asked.

“That’s me,” Mieka replied.

The boy nodded. “I’m Cayden. Cayden Silversun.”

“Sure nice to meet you,” Yazz interrupted. “Why are we meeting you again?”

“Cayden, if you please,” the un-preppy boy said.

“Cay’s a bit overdramatic,” the preppier of Cayden’s friends said. “Comes with working on lit mag. You’ll get used to it.”

“You write poetry?” Mieka asked just as Cayden hissed out a “shut it Jeska.”

“He edits and writes poetry and film critiques,” Jeska told him. “Really well too.”

“Cool,” Mieka said. “I, ah, paint.”

“Yeah?” Cayden asked in a quiet voice. He sounded impressed to Mieka and that- that was not something he was used to getting when people heard that.

“Art studio at school’s pretty much his,” Yazz told. “Even set up a site for commissions, with a business card and everything. Why, you here for a gig or something?”

“Are you _always_ this suspicious, or—“

“I’m glad his friend’s protective Rafe,” Cayden interrupted. “Makes my life easier.”

“Easier?” Mieka asked. “Easier how?”

“Oh just show him already,” Rafe said, leaning onto the doorway.

Cayden sighed. “I had hoped to do this _privately_ ,” he complained as he hooked a finger in the belt loop of his jeans and pulled the right edge down, revealing a tiny strip of slightly tan skin.

“I-ah- um,” Mieka swallowed, quietly changing his opinion about just how broad Cayden’s frame was. “What-“ Mieka tried to begin again, only to grow silent when he saw that there, right in the groove of Cayden’s hip, was a very noticeable soulmate mark in the shape of a cluster of purple thistle, surrounded by an airy grey pattern.

“You have no idea how long it took me to match this since this popped up last month,” Cayden was saying as Mieka felt himself begin to stare at it. “I was about to start leaving newspaper ads or something if Rafe hadn’t seen one of those business cards of yours over at Blye’s tavern.”

“It’s my name,” Mieka mumbled, hoping Cayden would understand he meant the soulmark.

“Mieka’s got a gold falcon on his collarbone,” Yazz said loudly, almost jarringly into the otherwise silent room.

“That’s Cay’s family crest alright,” Rafe said when Mieka tilted his head to show the mark to Cayden, eyes widening slightly at the sight.

“Aw, look at you two, taking each other’s names already,” Jeska teased, prompting Yazz to gently tap Jeska in the face with his foot.

“Let them have this moment, will ya?” Yazz said.

“Hey, be glad it isn’t Jeska,” Rafe replied while Mieka and Cayden continued to look at each other. “Then it would’ve been a spider.”

**III. The Third Life They Could’ve Lived**

“Welcome to Introduction to English Renaissance Theatre practices. My name is Cayden Silversun, and for the next 15 weeks you will join me as we explore one of the most foundational periods in theater as we’ve come to know it,” Cayden said in a practiced tone. “Yes, you will have to put on a skit, and no, we won’t just be covering Shakespeare.”

“Bugger,” a student muttered to himself, just barely loud enough for Cayden to hear. The comment made him smile on the inside: Cayden could still remember hurriedly opening up a new page in Microsoft Word on the small laptop notebook his brother Dery had gifted him for his high school graduation at the start of his first class with just as much enthusiasm. Cayden had only just managed to set the thing up before moving into Red Pebble Hall, where it had quickly taken up prime property on what he had guessed was the standard Ikea desk every dorm room was furnished with, and a week’s worth of use had convinced him that it was as stubborn as him.

Which had been fine: Cayden came from a long-line of very gifted, very stubborn individuals, and he knew he would whip it into submission. It had taken all of two weeks, which was admittedly just long enough to get him to mess up a little on his first couple weeks of class assignments, but it had worked and Blye the laptop continued to work with Cayden very nicely even now, all these years later.

“Now I know many of you probably have many questions about how the course will run, or why I am teaching it and not Professor Emmot,” Cayden said. “The second one is easier to answer: Professor Emmot is currently on sabbatical researching accounts of vampirism in 1800s Germany as part of a book he’s working on about how actors incorporated medical diagnoses into character roles, and as his current lead research and teaching assistant, he asked me to run this course.”

“He’s seriously writing a book on that?” a student asked, raising a hand to draw Cayden’s attention. “Why?”

“Your name please,” Cayden asked the student, who he saw was a young woman sitting in the front row.

“It’s Meg. Meg Mindrising.”

“Ms. Mindrising, have you watched any form of TV or film in the last twenty years?”

“Yeah, who hasn’t?”

“Then you may have noticed the rise of a very large number of characters that suffer from post-traumatic stress, as well as issues regarding physical, emotional, and substance abuse.”

Meg nodded. “That describes pretty much every character in the MCU right now.”

“It also happens to describe one of the major reasons that caused the entire Gothic movement as we know it today to come into existence,” Cayden told her. “And just like performers today have tried to mimic the realities of such diagnoses, performers did back then too. Professor Emmot happens to be writing about how they did that.”

“Yeah, but is he writing for _fun_?” Meg asked. “Or is it more like there’s some group of people out there who want to read it and he needs to publish or die.”

“Given the number of vampire fans and Professor Emmot’s well-established research history into the field of horror and Germanic Romanticism, I’d say both,” Cayden replied dryly, causing some of the students to laugh.

“As for the first question, it is my hope that it will run…mostly smoothly? As you can see in the syllabus,” Cayden continued, gesturing at the paper copy he had printed out in advance, “my contact information, office hours, and appointment scheduling processes, as well as the course readings, grading rubric, and the university policy regarding accommodations and weather notices have all been listed here for you to have. Yes, I will expect you to refer to and hold onto it _for the entire semester,_ as I will simply tell you to read it if you ask me a question it already answers. Any questions?”

“Yeah,” Cayden heard the student who had been muttering earlier say, his hand in the air.

“Yes, Mr…?”

“Mieka. That’s spelled M-I-E-K-A, said M-I-C-A,” the student said. “No title wanted or needed.”

“Fair enough,” Cayden said as the class laughed, “though don’t be surprised if your classmates give you one.”

“I won’t be,” Mieka said. “Anyway, quick question about the skit you mentioned.”

“You’ll be in groups of three, work of your choice, five minutes long,” Cayden began, already sighing internally at what he knew was going to be instructions he’d be repeating in about seven weeks.

“No, I- see, the thing is, I’m here doing a special effects program?” Mieka asked. “Like, I’m not gonna lie, I’m not big into the front end of acting, and so I wanted to ask what happens if I just. Don’t.”

“Don’t…act?”

“Yeah.”

Cayden blinked. “Your role in the skit is up to you,” Cayden said carefully. “I’ll admit most people _like_ the idea of getting up in front of others and sharing a bit about what they do, but if you feel you’d be better off behind a camera and adding artistic filters in, then you may.”

“Oh thank—”

“—provided,” Cayden went on, “that whatever you do would be stylistically appropriate to the theaters of England between roughly 1550 and 1650.”

“…that’ll be a challenge, but I am game for it,” Mieka replied slowly.

“Excellent,” Cayden said. “Now is there anybody else who has any questions? No? Very well. In that case, I’d like to start class off by playing you the following clip of a staging of _The Tragedy of Gorboduc_ by two of RU’s finest and upcoming actors, my friends, Jeska and Rafe. Please note,” Cayden added as he hit the button on the podium that would lower the projection screen and turn on the projector at the same time, “that there will be a graphic depiction of murder shown. If you are squeamish or otherwise triggered by such depictions, now would be an excellent time to let me know, as many of the tragedies and comedies we’ll be examining have a lot of deaths and bloodshed.”

Cayden watched as several students lowered their computer screens- including, he noted with pleasant surprise, Mieka- while a couple others fidgeted.

“Just how bloody are we talking here?” a female student asked suddenly. “Like, are we talking bloody like a couple seconds or…?”

“In this interpretation, Rafe and Jeska have opted for a fairly clean death, with just a little pool of blood shown for three seconds,” Cayden answered, absently moving the mouse to double click the AVI file he labeled had Dosvedanya Jeska!Videna. “In terms of the class ourselves, well, we _will_ see a staging of _Titus Andronicus_ , where one of the assignments will be to figure out exactly when and how many people die on stage in order to form a “death clock” to track them.”

“ _Dude_ ,” Mieka whispered loudly. “The Elizabethans were _hardcore_.”

“Or they just liked seeing people die,” another person in the class said back as the file opened in the version of Windows Media Player the university insisted its staff had to use.

“It’s more about trauma,” Cayden said as the file began. “Now, pay attention.”

  1. **The Fourth Life They Could’ve Lived**



“You approach the glassmaker and ask her to make you some withies,” Blye said, “but she turns you down, saying you have a terrible reputation.”

“Excuse her, I am glorious!” Mieka said. “Jeska, tell her I’m glorious.”

Jeska rolled his eyes. “I am not telling the glassmaker you’re glorious,” he said back.

“Cade?”

“Hey, you’re the one who overclocked his charisma stat,” Cayden said as he looked over his character sheet. “What makes you think me, a humble wizard, is going to get her to make you anything?”

“Because _you’re_ the one with the overclocked intelligence-stat Wizard,” Mieka replied as he reached out to his left and grabbed the can of Moon Mist he’d opened at the start of the session. “You _know_ I’m glorious.”

“The glassmaker is getting impatient,” Blye said.

“I talk to the glassmaker,” Rafe interrupted, “and explain that our troop needs withies for tonight’s performance of Silver Moon at the Downstreet tonight, so we’ be much obliged for her forgiveness and make us some withies.”

“Roll to persuade.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep.”

Rafe said and picked up a moss-green, twenty-sided dice. “Rolling to persuade.”

“Just watch it be a one,” Jeska teased.

Cayden sighed contentedly as he took a drink from his Dr. Pepper. Rafe, Jeska, Mieka, Blye, and him had started running their _Touchstones_ campaign back in year ten of high school, when the only way Cayden’s mom (the inspiration behind their campaign’s minor villainess Lady Jaspiela) could be convinced to let them hang out late after school was to show her they were playing a board game. The campaign had lasted the next four years, then all through Uni, and even now— after playing for almost ten years— they still found themselves gathering once a month somewhere in town to play the game. It had been the thing that kept them connected through Blye getting married, Mieka getting divorced, Rafe and Jeska becoming dads, and Cayden (happily, no, _really_ ) remaining single.

And in all that time, Jeska never kept hoping to see somebody actually roll a one.

“Nope, it’s a fifteen,” Blye said, reading the dice as it landed, the remark making Cayden chuckle to himself at the sight of Jeska rolling his eyes. “The glassmaker is persuaded to make you some withies.”

“I want it noted for the record that I, the great bard Mekal, is _appalled_ that a glassmaker is willing to take the word of a rogue over mine,” Mieka said. “Appalled I tell you.”

“Duly noted and ignored.”

“You are a fair but cruel Dungeon Mistress.”

“Good.”

“Now that we have our withies,” Jeska spoke up, “can we _please_ return to the tavern?”

“We just got off the Winter Ducal Circuit man,” Cayden pointed out. “It’s Spring Break for literally everyone in the game. Why are you _that_ badly in need of a side-quest already?”

“You know me and a character building day man.”

“The quest is supposed to be character building.”

“Your _face_ is character building.”

“Anybody want more of anything?” Rafe interrupted, pointing at the large, empty plate that rested on top of the _Touchstones: a Role Playing Game_ box on the corner of the table. “Or can I move it?”

“Load it up with the sweets,” Blye said. “Because the party _is_ heading back to the tavern, but as you trudge over the now thawing lanes of Gallantrybanks you run into none other than Tobalt the Chronicler.”

“Oh come on!” Mieka cried as Rafe got up from the table, taking the plate of cookies with him. “What is it, hate on me day?”

“Tobalt says there’s news from the capital,” Blye continued as she casually grabbed the glass of unsweetened iced tea she had brought in with her from the kitchen that morning while Rafe and Cayden had set up the campaign in what had been her father’s workshop, but had since been converted to her own study after she’d inherited the house. “It seems that Prince Ashgar has found himself a new wife.”

“Unless the next sentence is ‘and he wants to hire our party to rob the wedding party’ the answer is no,” Cayden said to Jeska.

“What? Is the Wizard afraid of a little theft?” Jeska teased back.

“The Wizard would like to avoid what happened the last time we took him up,” Cayden said. “Or have you forgotten that we had to go _three campaign sessions_ with Mieka’s character blind and silenced?”

“Don’t make me relive that man,” Mieka begged.

“As it happens, Tobalt _does_ want you to rob the wedding the party,” Blye interrupted just as Rafe arrived back at the table, the plate now filled with chips, cookies, Reese’s and Twizzlers. “Turns out there’s a really valuable book of plays being gifted to them, one of which details the history behind a secret treasure.”

“What’s happening now?”

“Tobalt wants us to rob Prince Ashgar’s wedding,” Cayden said. “And I am questioning your choice in snacks.”

“Hey, we are still five years away from the complete collapse of our teenage metabolisms,” Rafe said. “Let’s enjoy the massive amounts of carbohydrates and sugar while we still can.”

“I second that,” Mieka said, reaching out to grab a cookie that Cayden could now see was made of peanut butter. “It will be a sad, sad day when I have to give up our thematically appropriate Moon Mist soda for regular, lime-flavored water. Beholden for the cookie Rafe.”

“In any case, I’m up for robbing a Prince,” Jeska said. “Even if it’s just for a book.”

“A book?” Rafe asked. “Wait, this book wouldn’t happen to be that one book of plays Meg told us about when we were staying at her castle?”

“It would be _Lost Withies,_ yes,” Blye said.

“Dude, we are _so_ robbing the castle.”

“You don’t even like reading!” Cayden said.

“Listen wizard, I may not like reading, but I like coin. I like it a lot,” Rafe replied. “And that book could make us some _serious_ coinage.”

“Now there’s the rogue I like to see!” Mieka said. “I’m in!”

“That leaves you Wizard Silversun,” Blye said. “You in or not?”

“We’re robbing the wedding of an irritating Prince for a book that may make us rich,” Cayden said flatly.

“Emphasis on the rich part.”

“I just wanted to spend a night in my old room at Redpebble square with my brother Drery.”

“We’re still doing that,” Mieka said hurriedly. “I am 1000 percent behind you having a flashback to your days of overdramatic youth.”

“And he’d get to see Dery,” Rafe added. “His husband, you might recall.”

“Yeah I- hey, when exactly _is_ this wedding?” Mieka asked Blye. “I might need more than one night with my husband.”

Blye said and quickly rolled her own steel dice. “It’s in a couple weeks,” she informed him. “You have plenty of time for your engagement at the Downstreet and to stay with your families and kids.”

“Yes!”

“Oh, well,” Cayden said, hurriedly tamping down on the sudden rush of nerves that sunk in his stomach at the thought of role-playing as his character’s brother and Mieka’s character’s husband. “In that case, yeah, I’m in.”

  1. **And the life they _are_ living**



“Cayden are you alright?” Mieka asked as Cayden blinked. The gesture helped to settle him, let Cayden notice as the familiar stone walls and floors of Moonglade Reach came slowly into focus.

“I…will be, I think,” he said back to the Elf.

“Here, drink this.”

Cayden took the goblet from Mieka’s hand and drank it, the clean taste of water spilling refreshingly in his mouth. “Beholden for that.”

“Any time,” Mieka said, shuffling over to sit down in the leather chair across the study from where Cayden had sat down. “Now, do you want to tell me what the great Cayden Silversun, tregetour of the best band of actors ever seen, saw this time?”

“I’m not actually sure _what_ I saw.”

“What do you mean?”

“I- normally, The Elsewhens I see are futures that- that could be,” he said, choosing his words with all the care that a lifetime of guarding his dangerous secret and writing plays had led to Cayden doing habitually. “But these- I don’t see how _any_ of them are ones we could live. They didn’t even seem to be in this _world_.”

“…should I be worried about that?” Mieka asked.

“I- the first one showed us at one of those new cafes Princess Miriuzca is opening.”

“That doesn’t sound bad. I like those places.”

“Only it was being run by Mistress Luta, and we were both at the Royal College,” Cayden continued. “You were about to adapt what I think was some version of _Dragon_ where the dragon was the Knight’s child, and I was working on a piece about theater construction, and I was buying you a drink that had been mixed with blue thorn.”

Mieka stared at Cayden. “Come again?”

Cayden nodded. “Then I saw one where we were both sixteen again, and you had somehow just had a picture of my falcon inked onto your collarbone, and I your thistle on- on my hip of all places. Yazz was calling us soulmates in that one,” he continued. “And then I saw one that was…almost like the first, I suppose, only then I was teaching theater in place of Sage Emmot and you were a student in the class, and then one where we were all four playing a game named after ourselves, with Blye as some kind of manager.”

“Cayden,” Mieka said after a moment, “you haven’t been touching block—”

“ _No.”_

“Because it seems to me you just ran through _Doorways_ all by yourself in your head and you know I how I feel when you try to boot the glisker off the stage.”

“I didn’t cut you out Mieka, you were there in every single one of them. More than Dery or Blye was, or even Rafe or Jeska. In fact,” Cayden suddenly, “I-I think I wanted you in even _more_ in some.”

“Like that soulmate one eh?” Mieka said. “Well, I told you’d be growing old together, with my birthday and Rumble the cat still hanging on with us.”

“Sort of,” Cayden said, still remembering how in the soulmate one he had felt when he’d seen the lithe teenager lounging on the bed with Yazz’s chest for a head, how much he’d wanted to be that pillow himself. “It was less growing old and more…”

“…More?”

“More…married?”

“Married.”

“Yeah,” Cayden told the Elf, who had stood up at the idea. “I- I think in some of those lives two men could walk into High Chapel and have one of the Fathers marry them, and it definitely felt like I was beginning to want something like that in at least the soulmate life.”

“At last, someone tickles the Wizard’s fancy!”

Cayden grinned. “In the game one, _you_ were married to _Dery_ , but since it was a game _I_ was playing him,” Cayden teased. “So we were married in one of them in a way.”

“Aw, Cay, if you want to marry me, you only have to say so,” Mieka told him.

“What.”

“Oh sure,” Mieka told him in a tone that, even after all those years, still somehow managed to seem almost teasingly undecipherable to Cayden. “Jindra will make a lovely flower girl, and we have enough men for both parties. Can’t imagine the kind of glasses Blye will make for us though.”

“Blye would knock us _senseless_ if we tried to—”

“Princess Miriuzca might even let us do it in the palace gardens, all special like,” Mieka went on.

“You- you would actually marry me, wouldn’t you?” Cayden asked him suddenly.

Mieka rolled his eyes. “We already live together with a cat and a daughter, in _our_ mansion right off the river, and we work in _theater_ ,” he said.

“But I’m not interested in having sex with you,” Cayde said. “I’m not interested in really _anyone_. We talked about this, years ago, on that continental boat trip.”

“Most married people aren’t interested in that either after the honeymoon, if memory serves,” Mieka pointed out. “And as I recall, we were talking about Fairwalk and your stupid belief that you’re ugly back on that barge, both of which you’d better have outgrown by now or _I’ll_ knock you senseless.”

Suddenly there came the sound of a small bell.

“That must be Jindra, back from Uncle Jeska’s,” Mieka said. “How about I go get her, and you try to figure out why you had four Elsewhens that seemed to be about us getting married?”

“I- beholden, again,” Cayden said to Mieka as he left the study.

Left to himself the tregetour stood up from the chair he had slumped down in when the Elsewhens had first began to hit him earlier in the day, noting not for the first time that having a study without windows made it very difficult to track time, though Jindra’s return suggested it had at least been a thirty minutes. It was a dangerously long time to be unaware of one’s surroundings, making the fact that Mieka had apparently called around to find him a comfort.

 _I always knew they’d get stronger,_ Cayden thought to himself as he began to pace. _I just hadn’t expected to have so many differing ones like that so- so soon, I suppose._ Considering that normally the most he’d had was two in a row, and that four had almost been unheard of outside that one time he overdosed on thorn, and Mieka’s concern made a great deal of sense.

 _Still, what were they all about? Where they really just some…some message that Mieka and I should get married? I can’t believe that, nobody has ever—_ “at least,” Cayden said aloud to himself, “I’ve never met someone who said that, or who had married somebody the same- sure, snuck around, had a few tumbles, Fairwalk and Drevan had had those, but actually _marry?_ I- why am I truly _considering_ it?”

“Cayden, get out here!” Mieka’s voice came reverberating down the hall. “Jeska’s got something to show you!”

“Be right there!” Cayden called back.

 _Well, I’ll figure it out eventually,_ Cayden thought as he left the study, reminding himself of the words he and Mieka had almost taken as an oath to each other, words Cayden knew he’d be including in his wedding vows if that- that outcome were to happen. _I choose this life, and none other._


End file.
